Description - Women, Sex and Marriage in Early Modern Venice by Daniela Hacke
This study investigates systematically the moral policies of both Church and State in the age of Counter-Reformation confessionalization in Venice. Examining ecclesiastical and civil lawsuits related to illicit sex, broken marriage promises and disrupted marriages of artisan and ordinary women and men, Daniela Hacke can show how central sexual morality was to the patriarchal society of 16th- and 17th-century Venice. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, the author skilfully reconstructs what gender difference meant in daily life, in courtship rituals, marital disputes and in sexual relations. In the streets and in the courts, women and men fought not only over proper gender behaviour within and outside marriage, but also about the meaning of conjugality and of domestic patriarchy. Neighbours played an active role in mediating between distressed partners and between children and parents. Their interventions and perceptions reveal much about the moral values and the networks of support within a fascinatingly heterogeneous community such as early modern Venice.
The study aims to make important contributions to the fields of gender history, social history and the history of crime and sexuality.
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